


a soft epilogue

by toujours_nigel



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Domestic Fluff, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-12
Updated: 2017-05-12
Packaged: 2018-10-30 22:01:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10885785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel





	a soft epilogue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [filia_noctis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/gifts).



“I thought you said the potion made moons easier,” Sirius says, morning after the third night, while Remus is trying to fit his body back into the comfortable grooves of his favourite armchair. Someone’s beaten it back into shape while he’s been gone. He suspects Kreacher.

“It does,” Remus tells him. “This is easy, for forty-two. It gets harder to keep the wolf away, older I get; harder to come back.”

Sirius hums under his breath and drops the matter, leaves him in peace beyond the trays of food that get sent up from the kitchen.

 When he thinks to ask about it later Harry says something about _errands and lunch with Augustus Perkins or maybe it was Amanda Vane I dunno Remus_ , and looks peaky in a way he’s come to associate over the last three years with Harry hiding innocuous information. He should investigate, but he aches from temples through toes and it is easier to doze in his armchair and let the room lull him with its bright music and dim warmth.

Sirius isn’t back when he goes down for dinner, him and Harry companionable in the kitchen and Kreacher muttering over the honour of the house besmirched by their dogged refusal to use the dining room for anything less than a sit-down dinner for twelve. They host enough parties that it’s little more than a subsonic murmur of disgruntlement, barely audible over the fire crackling in the hearth, no interruption to their meal.

Harry this month is looking into the possibilities of modifying Howlers to relay less venomous messages for the use of blind witches and wizards, arguing spiritedly against the notion that individual mynah charms suffice.

He isn’t back when Remus goes to bed. He returns late, two or a handful of minutes later by Remus’ internal clock, kicks off his boots and drops into bed, wraps an arm around Remus and mutters something about the humiliating futility of drinking with children barely in their twenties, and is asleep before Remus can come awake enough to ask him where he’s been. 

Remus, as always unable to drop quickly back into sleep once woken, lies under the iron bar of his arm and wonders what children have been out drinking with Sirius on a Tuesday night and how it relates to the pleasurable secrets Harry’s keeping safe while the moon spills innocent light across their floor. When he sleeps he’s careful to turn himself away from Sirius’ whiskey-sour breath.

In the morning he wakes to Sirius halfway through his morning yoga routine, of all the habits picked up on his travels the most aesthetically rewarding, and watches an uninterrupted fifteen minutes before Sirius catches wind and breaks abruptly out of bow-pose to grin at him.

He’s still painfully thin, the damage dealt in his twenties pretty well permanent, but a half-decade of freedom have returned him flesh sufficient to clothe his ribs, render the cut of his iliac crest less stark, his smile a pleasure to look at. Remus smiles reflexively back, makes to climb out of bed and pull him to his feet. Harry sleeps late, soundly, and on the other end of a different floor. It’s more privacy than he’s ever before had, sharing a bed with Sirius.

“Stay where you are,” Sirius says, waves him back and hauls himself up and out the door, feet pounding down the passage and then the stairs. They need to work on the muffling charms, any step taken in any of the passages, stairs, common areas of the house sound clearly in his ears, rooms only a little better, a grand source of comfort and embarrassment. Nobody’d built this house, any house, thinking of lycanthropic senses. Sirius takes a strange joy in it, anyway, being loud for the sake of it, like he doesn’t move whisper-quiet when he wants, like he’d been trained into it in this very house.

He comes up quieter, careful, something inhuman clasped in his arms, Harry a couple steps behind and distinctly less careful about noise, moving forward to ease the door open, not looking at Remus. Sirius comes straight in, mewling bundle and all, climbs onto his side of the bed and starts unwrapping till triangular ears come poking out of the fold of cloth, a skull curved to fit the hollow of his hand, malevolent yellow eyes taking in the room.

“You got a Kneazle-kit,” Remus says flatly, too startled for questions, beckons Harry in from where he’s trying to edge back out, always the first to hear the least hint of dissent.

“Not pure-bred, you need a license for that these days; high-content, though, about three quarters or a bit more. Isn’t she a beauty?”

Beauty is not the word that springs to mind. She’s no more than three months old, maybe even a full month younger, lanky and starved-looking the way quick-growing things are, dark enough her markings don’t show, picking her lop-sided way across the bed. Sirius catches his wrist when he goes to touch her.

“She can’t have enough by way of teeth to do me any damage,” Remus says, surprised into teasing, then notices how carefully Harry is still sitting at the edge of the bed, only presenting a clothed thigh to feline explorations. “You got _me_ a Kneazle-kit.”

“I got you first refusal,” Sirius distinguishes. “Don’t touch her if you’d rather not have her around, she can go right back to her litter and no harm done. She’s not been held.”

 “Sirius went in to nose through them as Padfoot,” Harry explains. “I’d to fix him up with dittany when he came in last night.”

“Stood her ground after the rest of the litter scarpered,” Sirius informs him.

“Brave girl,” Remus says, lays his hand on the bed, fingers flattened.

The kitten tries her luck climbing Harry’s leg and torso, throws herself unimpressed down and over the pillow in sudden excess, and comes up to test her claws against the calluses on Remus’ palm.


End file.
